Meet Canvs: The Company Turning Your Emojis And Hashtags Into Emotions

Earlier this year, when HBO released the trailer for the much-anticipated seventh season of Game of Thrones, 266,598 fans commented on Facebook. During the This Is Us finale earlier this year, there were 70,258 tweets sent out about the tear-jerking Pearson family.

But when it comes to Nielsen ratings, the traditional currency of the television industry, these emoji-and-slang-filled online soundbites are meaningless. Even when they are taken into account by various analytics firms, the subtlety and volume of conversation leaves much of the data untouched.

That’s where Canvs comes in. Billed as a focus group for the 21st century, the company has developed a product that analyzes social media posts (sarcasm, misspellings, conflicting emojis and hashtags, included) across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, and extracts emotional reactions. Those Game of Thrones Facebook fans? 36% were excited. And the This Is Us Twitter following? 25.5% of them expressed love.

For an industry that craves data—and meaningful insights from that data—Canvs is extremely enticing. While using emotional insights to inform decisions is not new, focus groups are expensive and lack the breadth, immediacy and exact nature of Canvs’ information, which is available the next day. On top of that, Canvs does the job of data scientists--explaining what these reactions mean.

While other data firms tell you if something is received positively or negatively, Canvs breaks it down into 56 emotions. The company, which launched its product three years ago, counts over 85% of television networks as clients, as well as streaming services like Netflix, with all of them hoping to get inside the heads of viewers.

It has paid off: Canvs has been profitable since day one—a rare feat for a startup. Forbes estimates it made between $5 million and $7 million in revenue last year, with clients paying between $70,000 and $500,000 for the service. It has raised over $7 million from investors including KEC Ventures, Milestone Ventures, Gary Vaynerchuk, Rubicon Ventures and Sierra Wasatch Capital.

“Every decision we make--what we eat, what we wear--is advanced by how we feel,” explains Canvs’ affable founder, CEO and 30 Under 30 honoree Jared Feldman, adding that what we watch on TV is far from immune to that. “It’s important to count viewers, but most people want to understand why ratings go up and go down, and if you listen to the audience and how they feel, they will tell you.”

The data Canvs provides pulls out both quantitative and qualitative analyses from these feelings—be they love, hate, excitement or anger. On the quantitative side, the higher number of emotional reactions to a show, the more passionate, loyal and engaged the audience is. The qualitative side is much more nuanced, breaking it down by emotion, what that emotion is in reaction to and what that implies for the show, in general.

If a character on a drama is deeply despised, viewership is likely to go up. If a small part of a show sees a spike in the “funny” emotion, chances are it may go viral, as for every 1% increase in “funny” reactions, there is a 5% increase in shares.

“Anyone who creates content doesn’t actually care all that much about how you feel, they care about what you do because of it. Are you going to click on their thing; are you going to share their content; are you going to watch it?” Feldman explains, adding that the data leads to tangible changes. For example, he says multiple networks have killed off or saved characters because of data from Canvs.

Canvs allows television networks, advertisers and publishers to analyze what the social media reactions to their content means.

Courtesy of Canvs

“We use (Canvs) to get that temperature of how viewers are responding to our episodes, our characters and other elements of our content,” says Will Somers, EVP and head of research for Fox Broadcasting Company. “It’s a consistent feedback loop to evaluate the shows week-in and week-out in a cost-effective manner.”

These choices, of course, aren’t made entirely for the viewer’s pleasure. When an audience remains emotionally engaged throughout a show, it’s all the more appealing for advertisers who are seeking a viewer’s attention—something that seems to grow more elusive each year.

Advertisers and media buyers place ads within shows that generate emotions to match the product, causing a native-seeming viewing experience. BMW pairs well with a show that brings about exhilaration, for example. Walmart pairs well with trust, and Dos Equis pairs with interesting.

“We have always had a high level strategy and understanding of what consumers are thinking and their motivations and needs, but we’ve had a hard time connecting those needs to media execution. Canvs has been that missing link,” says Sarah Power, the Chief Strategy & Research Officer at Assembly Media. She says that a healthcare client has been paired with a show that garners sentimental and supportive emotions, like This Is Us or Dancing with the Stars. A fast-casual restaurant may pair better with a show that elicits happiness or enjoyment, like Ellen or Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

Television and Feldman go back a long way (or a long way for a 29-year-old), as he got his first taste of the industry as a student at NYU through a reverse-mentorship program in which he taught top executives at Turner the basics of social media in exchange for some cash.

“I was a super broke college kid, eating ramen everyday,” he says, and he while he’s no longer broke, he maintains his down-to earth enthusiasm.

The mentorship program showed him that media companies are hungry for data on who is watching and what they think, particularly when it comes directly from the consumer, as it does on social media. With that seed planted, Feldman enlisted the help of NYU professor Sam Hui. (“I schemed for two years to have a conversation with him,” Feldman says.) Hui, who is now the company’s chief scientist, and Feldman built Mashwork—which manually compounded data--and became the automated Canvs.

First, Feldman pitched the tool to music industry executives to be used in A&R, but was berated by industry executives who, nearly 10 years ago, were still at odds with the Internet and social media. So he turned to his former mentees in television, who embraced the product.

Nearly a decade later, Canvs has expanded far beyond television. The product’s ability to measure and extract meaning from reactions has applications for content creators in advertising, publishing, retail, and more. Clients include lifestyle brands like StyleHaul and PopSugar, fashion houses like Ralph Lauren and media agencies like Assembly.

The race for measurement is tight, and Canvs is competing against numerous other companies providing data sets to networks and advertisers—some of them even using emotional analytics. Magid’s emotionalDNA program evaluates content for dozens of different emotional touchpoints using survey data. TVision Insights uses its software to provide emotional data by reading viewers facial expressions. Shareablee, like Canvs, employs social data to measure digital popularity and affinity. Engagement Lab’s TotalSocial tool mixes social media conversation with word-of mouth analytics to create a total conversation volume metric. Networks often employ many of these services, not just Canvs, in order to have a well-rounded picture of their audiences.

Another roadblock lies in the fact that people may not share their feelings towards a show on social media. If audiences are engrossed in The Walking Dead, they may not be getting out their phones to tweet about it. If a show is a guilty pleasure—say a reality competition or sensationalist drama—viewers may choose not to share their feelings. After all, adults are spending about 25 hours a week consuming media, but only about five and a half hours a week are spent on social media, according to Nielsen’s most recent social media report.

“With any of this data from social media, you have to be cautious that it only takes into account the talkers,” says Jane Clarke, the CEO of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement, adding that there are caveats, despite Canvs’ language processing being particularly sophisticated. “There’s still the silent majority who just observes.”

But Feldman understands Canvs will never be the one-stop shop for all data--for now, he just wants to be the one-stop shop for what he considers the most important of them all.

“We are excited about becoming the industry standard in emotion and want to push the boundaries on why that matters,” he says. His emotional reading? Hopeful.